U.S. Senate run-off could be ‘squirrelly’

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s campaign wasted no time in putting out a runoff memo from its respected pollster, Mike Baselice, making it look like his July 31 runoff contest with national tea party favorite Ted Cruz is a formality.

“As expected, David Dewhurst captured the most votes in every media market,” it begins, and it goes on to list these strengths based on Baselice’s polling and “publicly available data” including:

– Dewhurst has a better positive-negative image ratio
– He led Cruz among Republicans who’ve voted in multiple primaries and senior citizens. They’re likely to vote in July, the memo says.
– His ads “defining Cruz and his involvement with the Chinese company” have been effective (Dewhurst slammed Cruz, a Houston lawyer, for representing a Chinese company on appeal after an American businessman won a judgment against it in an intellectual property case)
– Those who supported former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert “prefer Dewhurst over Cruz by 50 percent to 20 percent”

It concludes by saying that every Republican candidate who has entered a statewide runoff with more than 43 percent of the vote in the last two decades has won.

But this is a runoff like no other, one in which voters will be asked to go to the polls two months after the primary in the dead of summer, and other experts aren’t sure what to expect.
“A clear majority of incumbents who come close to 50 percent in the first primary go on to win. But this particular runoff could be squirrelly,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, by email. “Tom Leppert’s voters won’t move en masse to anyone – but they may not vote again, in many cases. The national conservative groups will come in hard for Cruz. And (Gov. Rick) Perry will have to work equally hard for Dewhurst, since his mojo is also being measured.
“As for Dewhurst,” Sabato said, “there goes another big chunk of his fortune. He’ll have to power his campaign with his own money, millions more for two long months.”
I’ve asked Cruz’s camp to weigh in.